coming north. One mother explained: “The people are so poor. There isn’t any work for women. Sometimes the women work helping to pick fruit, mostly lemons, and sometimes they make candies from coconuts to sell in other towns. Mostly they do not work at all.”62
Work in New Jersey, however, is not always as easy to obtain as parents expect. Arising, perhaps, from the long-standing pattern of circular migration between Mexico and the United States, the impression that work is plentiful in the United States permeates many Mexican communities.63 According to one migrant father, “I would say 75 percent of the people come fooled by this country. They are fooled by us immigrants who go back. We get a nice pair of shoes, good clothes and we say, ‘I earn so much and I have a car.’ . . . Everyone thinks that by coming they will make money quickly. They think coming here is living well.”
Mexican parents may find it difficult to maintain a steady job. Most parents initially use temporary employment agencies that offer irregular jobs and deduct their services, including transportation, from workers’ salaries.64 Even once better established and able to obtain jobs directly with employers, migrants are frequently unemployed.65 Many Mexican women work in factories that depend on a fluid labor force that fluctuates in size; the employers offer no benefits or job security. One mother I interviewed had worked for over two years at a factory, but she was fired when she took off too much time to care for a family member who had been diagnosed with AIDS. Ever since, she has moved from job to job, part of the temporary workforce. Work is also irregular in construction and landscaping, common jobs for Mexican men in central New Jersey. Work may be plentiful during the summer; some of the men I interviewed earned between six hundred and nine hundred dollars per week in cash. But when it rained and during the winter, they did not work at all.
Health problems, coupled with a lack of health insurance, also affect migrant parents’ ability to work. One mother, for example, had to leave her job when she underwent an emergency kidney stone operation. Others stopped working during and after pregnancies. A father, Armando, had health problems when he first arrived in New Jersey and landed a job in landscaping with his brothers: “I didn’t think it would be so hard here. . . . I first worked mowing lawns. But I didn’t last because my health wasn’t good when I got here. . . . I couldn’t last at that job. Instead I went to work in a factory.” As factory work pays less than landscaping, the move meant a lower salary than Armando had originally anticipated. Work-related accidents were also a problem for the fathers I interviewed. Mexican men have some of the most dangerous jobs in the United States.66 Even when health care for such accidents could be covered under workers’ compensation (regardless of immigrant status), they affect workers’ ability to economize and send earnings back home.
The Mexican parents I interviewed were extremely busy, mostly because of irregular and long work schedules.67 A migrant father explained: “When you come to this country, you have things to do; you have bills to pay, and responsibilities. It is not like your country where you work normally and you have time, because here you have to work to get what you want. You come home just to eat, in a bad mood and tired, to take a shower and go to bed.” As Paula described in the opening vignette, migrant parents work hard to benefit from the wage differential between Mexico and the United States. They hope to work as many hours as possible to take advantage of the time spent away from their families and to make the sacrifice worthwhile.
Migrant parents do not spend a lot of time or money on leisure activities. Those I interviewed typically used their one day off to shop, clean, and go to the Laundromat. Some migrant fathers play soccer or basketball at community parks in their free time. Mothers and fathers occasionally attend baptism parties, weddings, and birthday parties. They also attend local festivals organized around Hispanic Heritage month, Cinco de Mayo, and Mexican Independence Day. Some participate in church outings. Migrant parents rarely take vacations. Only one family I interviewed took an extended vacation to the beach; it was their first vacation in nine years. Spending little in New Jersey enables parents to save money more quickly. They hope this will decrease the total time spent away from their children.
Parents’ primary strategy for economizing is to minimize their housing expenses.68 Migrant parents share apartments with other Mexicans to save money. A few rent their own room in a house or apartment, usually spending about three hundred dollars per month. Most, however, split these costs further by sharing the room with someone else, often a spouse or romantic partner. Unattached fathers skimp even more. One man I interviewed occupied a shed at the nursery where he worked. Another slept on a mattress in the living room of a two-room apartment; a couple and their two daughters occupied the other room. Some fathers rented out space in unfinished, unheated basements (a safety hazard for them, because they slept so close to the homes’ furnaces). The single women I interviewed had a hard time finding people with whom to share rooms. When Elsa separated from her husband, she rented an unheated basement room for a few months until she met a man and moved in with him. The few single mothers who remained unattached lived with their siblings. Overcrowded housing for migrant parents is the norm.69
THE LIVES OF CHILDREN IN MEXICO
The lives children lead in Mexico are quite different. Children may not have access to running water or a flush toilet as their parents typically do in New Jersey (regardless of the overcrowded housing). Children may even live in unfinished houses that are slowly added on to as parents send money for improvement projects. But children do not lack space. I visited the homes of the children of twelve parents whom I had interviewed in New Jersey. Some lived in urban centers, others in small cities, and yet others in small towns. I also interviewed an independent sample of thirty-five children of migrants and twenty-seven of their caregivers. These families lived in a small town of approximately twenty-five hundred residents in the lower Mixteca region of Oaxaca that I call San Ángel, where I lived for seven months. All of these children lived in homes with larger patio spaces than available in the homes of parents in New Jersey. Although most neighborhoods do not have multiple public parks like those in New Jersey, children frequent the streets and neighboring homes and patios. In San Ángel, children often play by the river and in the downtown plaza in the evenings. Neighbors typically keep an eye on other people’s children. When my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Temo, and his three-year-old playmate decided to go out alone to buy candy at the corner store, I was quickly alerted to his whereabouts. All in all, the children I met in Mexico were less confined than were the children I met in New Jersey. In Mexico, children have greater freedom in what Roger Hart calls their “experiences of place.”70
Children in Mexico most often live with caring family members, usually grandparents. Media portrayals of the plight of unaccompanied minors crossing the border suggest that they are the abandoned children of migrants and have experienced abuse prior to migration.71 Although many children of migrants do end up migrating themselves, I found that most were not neglected or in physical danger in their homes in Mexico. Indeed, a 2008 study shows that 92 percent of unaccompanied migrants in U.S. custody lived with family members prior to migration and that none reported escaping abuse as their reason for leaving home.72 Most of the children I met not only lived with family but also had a number of extended family members nearby, such as cousins, aunts, and uncles, who were a daily presence in their lives.
Although surrounded by family, children’s caregivers in Mexico do not typically take in boarders as is so common in New Jersey. Families for the most part own their own homes. In fact, housing construction is one of the primary goals of migration.73 They do not pay rent and do not have mortgage payments; therefore they do not depend on income from boarders to meet the costs of living in a given month. In 2003, only five of San Ángel’s 510 houses were rented. I met only one family who took in a boarder; Doña María told me she deliberated for months before deciding
A main street in San Ángel, which stays relatively empty until the school day ends, when children are frequently seen outside playing. Photograph
